WOULD THIS PROGRAM BE VALUABLE TO YOU?

My Experience

I found this program a life saver at tax time, but of course, your experience could be different. In my case, I was behind and had not updated my Quicken databased program for a whole year. And then I realized, as I had before, that the only download option available to me over this time was PDF statements. And I sure did not look forward to entering each character by hand while reading the tiny print on PDF forms. I hate drudgery. So I decided to write a software program to remove some of the drudgery.

Will it Work for you? Only you could say. But I can see two ways where it might not have value to you.

 1. A Need in the First Place? - In the first case unless you use a database program for expenses like Quicken or if you have found another way to work with your database program that works fine for you, then this program may not help at all.

2. Will Your PDF Bank Statements Work? - The second issue is that even if this program "could" be useful to you, this program keys from text data copied from PDF statements to the computer clipboard. And there seems to be no standard for how banks do these PDF statements. Speaking as a software programmer, this is NOT the simple spreadsheet world of tab delimited spreadsheets which are easy to decode. Nope. In this case banks often leave off the years, or could show dates a few different ways. And banks or credit cards may give expenses or deposits by themselves or with total amounts, and they might make expenses plus or minus. If this is not bad enough, some bank statements then also might put additional dates or amounts internal to the description on the line, making decoding much harder since they would then be using their decode primary characters several times with different meanings. So what was done? We used it on four different types of PDF's for our purpose. Two were banking and two were credit cards. There was some variety there. We got it to work... well enough for our tastes. We did add a possible red comment at the beginning of each data line if the software found something that it though you should double check - such as "**check value" which means the deposit or expense was missing and the software tried to figure it out from the totals column - if there was one. But that could be in error if the first or last line and nothing to compare it to... or after other line issues. So the red comment suggests checking. Also, if there was a cash back issue, the software ties to split the transactions totally. The first transaction would be for the primary purpose and the line below it, a new line, that would deal with "cash back" adding a cash expense category of your choice called "usage" in the category tab delim list that you would make.

And so, we have not seen every possible PDF, but perhaps 4 that might be represented. What kind of lines does this software not seem to decode? And also, please note that when highlighting PDF text data to only highlight a data area that can be many lines, but not the verbiage nonsense before or after it. You can use the "PDF add" key if you wish to combine several areas on one checking list... as long as you stay below 200 lines total. The examples that we believe it now descodes... on a data line basis:

Examples:

Date/Description/+-Expense
Date/Date & Description/+- Expense
Description/Date/+-Expense
Two or Three checks or more same row each with:  Check Number/Date/+-Expense
Date/Description/"Purchase"/expense/"Cash Back"/expense/total expense/Running Total

And in the above, preferable if the date is with a / slash like "2/11" but can also be like "Feb 11".

Summary of Variations

It is clear that there is no format that all bank statements follow. Sometimes expenses are plus, sometimes minus. Sometimes the description is in front of the date, sometimes after the date but before the amount. Sometimes there is a "cash back" that our software tries to make into a separate entry, since cash back is likely different anyway than the food or goods business of the store. Sometimes we have seen three checks in a row on the same line. At times we have seen a text date like "Feb 11" instead of "2/11". And in the case of one bank, the deposits were visible on the PDF form, but when the form was highlighted the deposits were missing but the expenses and totals were there. And so in that case, our software tried to recover the missing debits from the totals at the line end when it could, but also to write a red warning to "**check value".

Possible Problem - could there be a bank pdf type that we have not seen yet? Or could there be a case where the PDF does not even leave a blank or other separator between date, description and expense? We cannot be certain. And so, we cannot be certain that this program will decode the PDFs that you need.

WHAT HELPS THE PDF DECODER

Of course, some things help the decoder. Here are some I use:

• Set the settings of year, expenses + or -, and date type of / or text like feb 11 BEFORE loading data
• Note that some banks will put checks in one place on the PDF form, but then repeat them with other expenses. I just use the second group
• Highlight only data areas that begin and end with lines of data, and not headings or verbiage before using ctrl +c to copy
• Look for red comments that this software may give if it had difficulty fixing missing deposit amounts or it had to do a new line to account for a cash back.
• Scan the whole list of oddities before transfering it to your bank database program like Quicken
• Note that the program gives a total of expense / deposit impact. You of course could check this amount with what the statement says between those two dates... to see if the amount change plus or minus is the same. If not, perhaps an amount came through wrong
• If you do have a PDF statement that uses a text month like "Jan " or "Feb " look carefully at how the months are spelled and how long they are. The pre-stored text option we used was for the credit card company we ran into. In each case, for 12 months, the 12 months were the first three letters of the month, followed by a space. If your bank or credit card company uses text months but different groupings such as "Sept " with 4 letters and then a space, well, you can put in your own line string of months in your category tab delim list by using "form" in the first column to say what this is, and in the second column the line string of 12 months. Below is the one we use that is inherent in the software - unless you replace it with your own:

           Jan ;Feb ;Mar ;Apr ;May ;Jun ;Jul ;Aug ;Sep ;Oct ;Nov ;Dec ;